The last days I spent a lot of time debugging a little piece of software that was supposed to help my computer. But instead it turned out to be one of the buggiest programs I've ever seen: watchdog[1], a software watchdog implementation that may reset my computer if "serious problems are detected" ... One of these serious problems may be an unreachable network. But the implementation of the "ping another host to check if the network is OK" feature seems to fail independently of any real network problems. Another function monitors a network interface for traffic. But as soon as more than 2.1 GB passed the interface the function stops working and stays at 2147483647 bytes. This aswell is interpreted as a "network problem" (no traffic = no network = no good) ...
Other issues affect the way logfiles are written (how often and how much information) and the calculation of seconds with may be totally out of sync with reality.
You can find some patches and proper bugreports on [2]. I tried to submit some reports to Bugs.Gentoo[3] but they don't really care and refered me to "upstream" ...
[1] http://freshmeat.net/projects/watchdog/
[2] http://www.christoph-probst.com/technik/software/watchdog/5.2.4/
[3] http://bugs.gentoo.org/
